A Multi-Function Peripheral (“MFP”) is a single device that serves several functions, including printing. Typically, an MFP can act as a printer, a scanner, a fax machine and a photocopier. MFPs are particularly popular for use in home offices or small businesses. The single machine saves on the expense and the space that would be required to purchase and use a separate device for each function performed by the MFP.
In addition to the MFP, offices, particularly home and small offices, are aided by the use of standardized forms or templates for documents that need to be produced repeatedly. With a standardized form, a template of the document is created electronically. The electronic template file includes all the formatting, text and other elements of the document that remain unchanged from use to use.
Consequently, the user can access the template file when needed, make the changes or add the elements required for that particular use of the document and print the result. In this way, the time required to produce documents based on the standard template is minimized.
In some applications, it may be necessary or desirable to add photographs, images or blocks of text to the standardized form. In such instances, the form template may allot space into which such additional material can be inserted. A common approach to adding photographs and other such material to electronic documents is to scan the photograph or other material using a scanner. The scanned image can then be inserted into the electronic document, including a form template.
Unfortunately, the process of scanning an image and then inserting it into a document is not always simple. A key problem is sizing the scanned image to fit appropriately into the document. This is of particular concern if the scanned image must fit in a pre-defined area or field within an electronic form template. In one approach to this problem, the image is scanned using a scanner and, perhaps, a scanning application on a host computer. The scanned image is then inserted, or pasted, into the electronic document which is opened in a document processing application. Once the image is in the document, it can usually be resized to fit with the other elements in the document.
However, adjusting the size of the scanned image in the document processing application can often result in a low-quality image with poor resolution or a distortion of the image. Alternatively, the image may be cropped in an unwanted fashion when resized in the document. If the image is repeatedly scanned in a trial-and-error fashion to obtain a suitable image, the procedure can become very time consuming.
An alternative to this approach is to know, before scanning, the desired size of the scanned image and set the scanner to generate an image of that size with an appropriate resolution. This approach, however, obviously requires a detailed knowledge of the scanner and the scanning and document processing applications being used. Moreover, this approach is time consuming to execute, particularly if a trial-and-error approach must be used.
Consequently, there is a need in the art for an improved method and system of scanning images (text and/or graphics) that will be inserted into an electronic document, particularly a pre-defined form template, when using a multi-function peripheral.